I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body by Tarn Wilson

I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body

I had such complicated feelings about my mother’s body.
So much softness and self-hatred, but I liked her collar bone.
Her collar bone is the only jewelry she left me, the statement
necklace I wear just under my skin, so pronounced it collects
pools of water that could hold icy jewels or little fish.
Clavicle. The only large vertical bone in our bodies. A hanger
on which to balance our head and dangle the rest. The first bone,
in the womb, to begin to ossify; the last to finish, early twenties.
In my early twenties my newly-finished collar bone was an elegant
curve. Now my skin is a rumbled suit and my collar bone whispers
too loudly of skeletons. In the end, my mother was mostly bone,
and in that hollowed shape I could see every face she’d ever had.
A montage that shifted as she turned her head. You can only
love a body that has so little left, that has worked so hard to live.
I’ve never feared skeletons, maybe because I’m in love with form.
The shapes of leaves. The architecture of dogs. The silhouette
of trees. The intricacies of animal feet. My soft and hard, wild
and difficult mother knew little of the structures children need.
She was always changing: her job, her city, her story, her beliefs,
who it was this week she hated most until there was no one left
to hate. But there it was: her essential shape–with me always
–smaller than I would have guessed–and braver.

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Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work appears in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in Only Poems and Potomac Review.